The ProgPoW Team Now Apparently Planning to Chain-Split Ethereum Prior to Constantinople

An anonymous individual going by the name of “Ikmyeong Na,” who says he is a ProgPoW developer and worked on it for months, has stated an Ethereum ProgPoW node has been launched with the aim of chain-spliting ethereum before or at the time of Constantinople in three days. He or she says:

“Ethereum ProgPoW project started to create an alternative ethereum node with native ProgPoW adoption, based on Geth, the most famous ethereum client and the work base from Holiman from ethereum foundation.”

He further says “I started to create a codebase of Ethereum ProgPoW since last October,” and “we’ve excluded Constantinople support from the codebase.”

That means this new coin would have higher inflation if it gains any traction as they’re apparently keeping the three eth per block reward despite ethereum reaching general consensus to lower it to two.

Constantinople, in addition, has a number of other nice featured coded over many months by eth devs. Tis not clear whether all those other features have been removed too.

The persona himself seems to have come into existence in or around October when he made a seemingly little used Twitter account. In November he then joined Reddit. Both accounts are solely focused on ProgPoW.

We can see above this persona posted the ProgPoW FAQ by another anonymous individual called “IfDefElse.”

So suggesting that Ikmyeong is an integral part of the ProgPoW team and rather than this being one individual it may be that the ProgPoW team is using the chain-split as some sort of tactic. Specifically:

“They don’t have any intention to fork for ProgPoW cause they don’t want to take a risk for creating a new classic chain created by ASIC miners.”

So apparently now they’re creating a classic ProgPoW chain. Something which may explain the 51% attack on ETC as some theorize, and this is speculation, that miners want to get rid of ETC to make room for the new classic chain.

The implementation of ProgPoW has become controversial after some suggested the team behind it has a relationship with Nvidia.

A recent post on ethermining, for example, says: “Please explain why Nvidia has a 40% advantage over AMD on progPOW.”

Some suggest the compared Nvidia gear is more expensive while others argue the processing capabilities are the same, so there shouldn’t be an advantageous difference, with the picture not at all clear as it stands.

What appears clear, however, is that the proposed algo change would be picking winners and losers between GPUs and asics and potentially even within GPU miners.